Source on David Smith

“Our open fields on the mountaintop are fully exposed to the sky, clouds, and wind without mediation… The fields are quiet to the world but amplify the force of one's thoughts and feelings.. .My father put his sculptures in our fields so that he could look at each work in relation to the natural world of the mountains and sky and also to its fellow sculptures. Again and again, he referred to his 'work stream'; each work of art being as a vessel filled from the stream while never wholly separate.”

“Smith often said he made only girl sculptures. He explained: I don't make boy sculptures. They become kind of personages, and sometimes they cry out to me that I should have been better or bigger, and mostly they tell me that I should have done that twelve years before--or twenty years before.”

“According to my mother, Jean Freas [David Smith's second wife], 'Australia' [he made in 1951] was the first to be placed squarely in the center of the field beyond the house. David Smith was well aware that 'Australia', with its fluid gestures of a long arm swinging gracefully, was an extremely important piece, heralding a new era for his work. It represented a culmination of his sinuous use of metal and the technique of drawing in space. Thus planted, Australia drew not just in any space--such as the impartial space of a museum gallery -- but in the specific landscape of Bolton Landing.”

“In the years I knew my father, we used the fields around our house fully and constantly …In summer, we often ate breakfast in our pajamas on the terrace looking out on the possibilities of the day. My father encouraged my sister and me to run among the sculptures, to climb, to put our bodies into the elements of the sculptures, to bang out tuneless rhythms and hear the difference between the sound of flat and volumetric elements. It was a playground for the unconscious.”

“I believe that gazing out at his fields, as he so often did, he found a kind of peace in the balance of the sculptures, which were like so many aspects of his identity. Physically manifested and set together to form their own dialogue -- ultimately aesthetic -- the sculptures in the fields brought a kind of musical order to the dissonance of his inner flow of feelings. He always said that for him, art was easier to do than life.”

“My father acted at all times and in all aspects of his life from his identity as an artist. He had no other. He cooked with the extravagant generosity and adventurousness of an artist. He parented as an artist -- his children should not wear 'pretty' colors, but rather 'gutsy' colors.. .While he could be generous, spontaneous, playful and hospitable, the sense of 'I am' was all about 'I am an artist.' There was little room to identify himself in terms of other people. And so he felt lonesome.”